Capitalist Crisis & Revolutionary Opportunity

Sixth International Conference of the IBT

In April 2011, delegates from all sections of the International Bolshevik Tendency
(IBT), as well as non-delegate members and close sympathizers, met in Western Europe for
the organization’s Sixth International Conference. The international conference, the
highest decision-making body in the tendency, discusses and debates outstanding
programmatic issues, evaluates the work of the preceding period and outlines future
perspectives. It also has the responsibility to elect a new International Executive
Committee.

The global economic crisis provided the backdrop for a variety of discussions,
including recent developments in inter-imperialist relations, the growing stresses in the
European Union and the increasing weight of China in the world economy. The “Tasks
and Perspectives” document, which was adopted with only minor modifications,
began:

“Global capitalism is mired in its most severe crisis since the 1930s.
The historic proportions of the present slump—the first great depression of the 21st
century—point to the fact that we have entered a new phase of capitalist
decomposition. The coming period will be marked by intensified class struggles and
sharpened global contradictions….”

With international capitalism “teetering on the brink of a second wave of
financial and economic collapse associated with falling aggregate demand and the
unprecedented levels of public debt incurred over the past two years,” the document
noted that trouble in any sector (such as the unfolding crisis in the Eurozone) could
“quickly spread throughout the globalized economy” and projected that:

“The ruling classes are likely to respond by pushing austerity measures
that far outstrip the severe cutbacks that have already been made and/or proposed, and
they may attempt to drive down wages to subsistence levels. Under these conditions, the
ability of the working class to resist will initially, in many cases, be undermined by
material hardship, but the eventual consequence must be a revival of raw class struggle
and the creation of conditions in which the ideas of revolutionary socialists will gain a
potential base among the broad masses not seen for generations.”

We also observed that U.S. imperialism’s failed military gambits in Afghanistan
and Iraq had exacerbated the economic downturn and contributed to growing geopolitical
instability:

“Combined, the ‘wars’ will end up costing the American ruling class
trillions of dollars—a liability that has only compounded the looming debt crisis
associated with the financial meltdown, threatening to unseat the U.S. dollar as the
currency of international exchange. Millions of working-class Americans,
disproportionately blacks and Latinos, have lost their jobs, their homes and any remaining
hope that the lives of their children would be more materially secure than their
own.”

At the same time, we are witnessing important and historically unprecedented changes in
the capitalist world order:

“The Chinese deformed workers’ state has emerged as a major factor
in world politics and the global economy as the relative position of the U.S.
deteriorates….The United States, the leading capitalist power, is massively
indebted to China, which props up the American colossus for fear of destabilizing a global
economic order on which it uneasily depends. More than that, China is redirecting its
investments from American Treasury Bills to acquisition of minerals and other raw
materials from Latin America to Africa, often in direct competition with imperialist
powers.”

The economic crisis has also highlighted the limited and fragile character of European
economic integration:

“The economic crisis has exacerbated tensions within the European Union
(EU), though the German and French bourgeoisies—at the heart of the bloc—plan
to continue cooperating within this framework for the foreseeable future. The EU is an
unstable alliance, and a breakdown or radical redesign cannot be ruled out in the coming
period. The euro has not been able to displace the U.S. dollar as the global currency, and
its maintenance required the bailout of the Greek and Irish economies with only grudging
acceptance from Germany, whose chancellor recently had to quash serious speculation about
a return to the Deutschemark.”

The prospect of deepening European instability poses the possibility of radical shifts
and disjunctures in a global economic order long dominated by the U.S.:

“Russia, which has, against the odds, managed to reassert itself as a
major player on the world stage, is another complicating factor. Moscow, although playing
a weak hand, seeks a spot at the top of the global imperialist order and has developed
stronger ties with Germany. The collapse of the EU could trigger a rapid realignment of
‘great powers’ the likes of which have not been seen for some
time.”

Explosive Class Struggles on the Horizon

The tempo and intensity of class struggle in Europe are likely to rise dramatically in
the coming period:

“The global economic crisis has resulted in the virtual bankruptcy of
Iceland, Greece and Ireland, while Portugal, Italy and Spain are on the brink of meltdown.
Workers and youth in those countries have responded to the capitalists’
‘recovery’ program (austerity and unemployment for the masses) by launching
important protests and labor actions….The chances of pitched class battles in the
coming period are high.”

Attempts by more militant elements of the European proletariat (particularly in Greece)
to resist bourgeois austerity have thus far had little impact: “The working class
has fought back, but it is disorganized and badly led. Indeed, the most important factor
hampering even effective defensive action is the treacherous labor bureaucracies and the
reformist political parties.”

The Tasks and Perspectives document projected the inevitability of resistance in the
U.S., but observed that there have been “few signs of a generalized working-class or
socialist revival: these are dark times in the belly of the beast.” However, the
surprisingly rapid rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement across North America in the
autumn of 2011 reflects a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo that could portend
explosive class battles in the near future. Given a combination of a low level of class
consciousness and the abject servility of the official leadership of the workers’
movement, we anticipated that popular resistance might initially take non-traditional
forms:

“We may see the development of new organizations that go beyond the
scope of OROs [ostensibly revolutionary organizations] or trade unions or even united
fronts, which combine elements of a political party with those of a campaign or bloc. We
must be careful neither to embrace these too eagerly nor dismiss them as not conforming to
preconceived ideas of organization, but should make a sober assessment of the political
basis of these formations.”

The document projected that the inspiring “Arab Spring” uprisings which
toppled pro-imperialist dictators in Tunisia and Egypt would be unable to address the
contradictions of capitalist “underdevelopment” in the absence of an
authentically socialist leadership rooted in the working class. The global crisis of
proletarian leadership can ultimately be resolved only through the creation of a mass
international revolutionary party capable of leading the working class and oppressed in a
struggle to seize power, expropriate the bourgeoisie, overturn “free market”
tyranny and establish a socialist planned economy on a world scale.

Conference attendees also participated in a concurrent educational series, including a
session on some of the most important lessons to be gleaned from the long history of
revolutionary trade-union work. While we are the inheritors of a rich tradition of
Trotskyist interventions in the organized labor movement, the IBT unfortunately does not
currently have the forces to undertake this type of work in a concerted fashion.
Nonetheless some comrades have been able to carry out limited exemplary actions. For
instance, in 1917 No.32 we reported on a teachers’ walkout to protest
educational cuts that was initiated by an IBT supporter in New Zealand. For several
decades IBT supporters and friends have also been intimately involved in strike actions by
dockers in California, which have provided a practical demonstration, albeit on a
relatively small scale, of the social power the working class can wield with militant
leadership. Despite the inadequacy of our current resources, the IBT recognizes the
strategic importance of the fight to build a class-struggle leadership in the trade
unions, and we are committed to undertaking this vital work as opportunities present
themselves.

Our Political Opponents

Whether in the mass organizations of the proletariat or on other fronts of the class
struggle, winning fresh forces to the Marxist program requires a combination of tactical
flexibility and political intransigence. The reforging of a mass, revolutionary
international party will be a complicated process involving splits and fusions among
existing leftist formations and the skillful development of exemplary mass work to
politicize and build a base among broader layers of the working class and oppressed. As a
small sub-propaganda organization, the chief priority of the IBT today must be to seek to
forge a pole of international regroupment through struggle for programmatic clarity within
the left and workers’ movement. As Lenin insisted, the responsibility of
revolutionaries at every stage in the development of a proletarian vanguard party is not
only to provide leadership on the ground in actual class struggles, but also to formulate
a clear Marxist response to key issues facing the working class while drawing sharp
“lines of demarcation” with reformist and centrist pseudo-socialists.

In many areas where we are active, most of the organizations of the “far
left” have been moving incrementally to the right for several decades, thus
increasing their programmatic distance from us and the Leninist-Trotskyist political
tradition they claim to uphold. On the one hand, this rightward drift, recently manifest
in a widespread willingness to embrace NATO’s “humanitarian” cover story
for bombing Libya, reduces the likelihood of any significant regroupment from their ranks.
On the other hand, the contradictions are sharpened for any of their members who take the
heritage of Bolshevism at all seriously, while the distinctions between hard-communist
class-struggle politics and flabby social-democratic lesser-evilism have become much more
obvious even to relatively inexperienced people.

In formal programmatic terms, the political organization closest to us is the
U.S.-based Internationalist Group (and its somewhat ephemeral League for the Fourth
International—IG/LFI). Like the IBT, the IG was founded by cadres driven out of the
ex-Trotskyist Spartacist tendency. During its decade-and-a-half existence, the IG has
refused all proposals to discuss our common history and the lessons to be derived from it
(see our letter to the IG of 15 December 1996, reprinted in Trotskyist Bulletin No.6). The IG leadership has
also avoided any serious discussion of the substantive differences that have arisen
between us, including their blanket denunciation of participants in the 1999 anti-WTO
“Battle of Seattle,” their rejection of the Fourth International’s policy
on workers’ sanctions in the 1930s (see 1917 No.31) and, most recently,
their repudiation of the call to “jail killer cops” (see “‘IG on Jailing Killer
Cops,’”). To cover their unwillingness to engage in serious programmatic
debate, the IG leadership has on occasion stooped to the sort of misrepresentation and
outright slander characteristic of the degenerate Spartacist League (SL) of the 1980s and
1990s.

The IG’s leading cadres are talented and energetic, and, on most questions, our
programmatic positions are substantially similar. Yet their aversion to seriously
addressing their own origins, and critically evaluating the profoundly flawed practices
they assimilated as part of the leadership of the degenerating International Communist
League (ICL—the international tendency headed by the Spartacist League/U.S.)], has
produced a brittle organization with a sometimes sectarian and occasionally
near-hysterical leadership style and a stilted internal life. While the IG’s
leadership is capable of producing sophisticated and informative propaganda on a wide
range of issues, its attempts to project the image of a far larger and more influential
organization, and distaste for serious political interaction with leftist opponents, have
resulted in an inability to develop new cadres. After a decade and a half, the IG/LFI has
yet to report on a founding conference (or any other sort), perhaps because no such
gathering has taken place. This is not a healthy sign from an organization that at one
point or another has claimed to be active in at least a half-dozen countries.

The increasingly insular and cultish Spartacist League/U.S. and its international
affiliates continue to drift away from their origins as the Trotskyist opposition to the
American Socialist Workers Party’s descent into reformism in the 1960s. The
SL’s downward political trajectory combines sectarianism (recently extended to a
rejection of the united-front tactic in general and specifically in defense of Mumia
Abu-Jamal) with bizarre opportunist lunges—the most spectacular of which was the
overtly pro-imperialist support for American military forces in Haiti in 2010. After
months of defending the indefensible—chiefly in polemics against ourselves and the
IG—the SL eventually repudiated its position as a social-imperialist capitulation,
but could not explain how such a position was swallowed by the entire membership without
demur. The SL has referred to this capitulation as their “August
4th”—a reference to the betrayal of the Second International at the
outset of World War I. We see their Haiti position (which had been preceded by a series of
earlier social-patriotic capitulations) in somewhat less world-historic terms as evidence
that the ICL cadre is now so depoliticized that it is effectively brain dead (see
“Sclerotic
Spartacists Unravel,” May 2010). While its weight in the left has continued to
shrink, the ICL’s formally Trotskyist posture on many issues still allows it to
attract (and then destroy) the occasional high-quality young recruit. Given the rightward
drift of the left generally, the SL/ICL remains an important opponent for us, particularly
in North America.

In Britain, our most important opponents are probably the heterodox centrists of
Workers Power (WP—flagship of the League for the Fifth International [L5I]). Workers
Power is a politically unstable organization with an appetite for mass work, an
essentially unserious attitude to questions of political program and, paradoxically, a
capacity to sometimes approximate hard-left Trotskyist positions—which makes it more
attractive to some youthful radicals than its larger more staid “Trotskyist”
competitors.

Workers Power’s constant attempts to swim with the stream of petty-bourgeois
radical opinion have led to many political gyrations. This adaptationist impulse is
evident in its recent unexplained alternation between mutually contradictory calls for the
construction of a “revolutionary tendency in the Labour Party” and an
“anti-capitalist party” along the lines of France’s reformist Nouveau
Parti anticapitaliste.

A willingness to support whatever “mass movement” happens to be popular at
any given moment led the nominally Soviet-defensist WP to back Lech Walesa in the 1980s,
Boris Yeltsin in 1991 and virtually every other counterrevolutionary formation that arose
during the protracted process of capitalist restoration in the degenerated and deformed
workers’ states of the Soviet bloc.

In 1995, the “anti-imperialists” leading Workers Power refused to defend
Serbia against NATO bombers—a shameful betrayal replicated by their recent embrace
of imperialism’s auxiliaries in carrying out “regime change” in Libya.
The L5I’s distance from Trotskyism was perhaps most clearly illustrated by an
apparently serious suggestion that the collection of Third World nationalists, trade-union
bureaucrats and liberals that lead the World Social Forum declare themselves “a new
world party of socialist revolution” (see “Doubletalk & Zigzags,”
1917 No.32).

The New York-based League for the Revolutionary Party/Communist Organization for the
Fourth Inter-national (LRP/COFI) is a state-capitalist variant of a “Third
Camp” current that defected from the Trotskyist movement over 70 years ago. The LRP
has a moralistic petty-bourgeois streak that shapes its attitude on a variety of
questions, including Israel/Palestine. At the same time, the LRP has managed to stay its
political course over the years and can at least be counted on to say what it means and
mean what it says. Moreover, it has the capacity to approximate a revolutionary position
on some questions of vital importance to the American workers’
movement—particularly the necessity of a hard break with the bourgeois Democratic
Party and “third party” liberals like Ralph Nader. This is sufficient to
qualify it as one of the more serious leftist organizations in the U.S. today.

The International Socialist Tendency (led by the British Socialist Workers Party
[SWP]), the two groups deriving from Ted Grant’s Militant Tendency in Britain (the
Committee for a Workers’ International and the International Marxist Tendency) and
the United Secretariat (USec) are the more active ostensibly Trotskyist formations we
encounter internationally. While each is thoroughly reformist, they all possess the social
weight, geographical dispersion and ability to present a sufficiently plausible Marxist
face to allow them to continue to recruit serious militants. The USec is distinguished
from the other three by the political heterogeneity of its sections, which in some cases
has resulted in several affiliates in the same country. In recent years the North American
Socialist Action (SA) grouping has been operating as a sort of left opposition within the
USec.

The Tasks and Perspectives document observed that the general shrinkage and rightward
evolution of many of the ostensibly Trotskyist currents have not been equally
characteristic of Maoist and anarchist formations, some of which have increased their
influence in areas where we are active. Our continuing involvement in the struggle to free
Mumia Abu-Jamal, which has brought us into contact with some of these groups in the past
period, has underlined the importance of engaging with militants who may identify with
leftist traditions openly hostile to Lenin and/or Trotsky.

Taking Stock, Moving Forward

In assessing our work since our 2008 conference, we noted that despite some limited
successes (e.g., gaining supporters in France and Poland), we have yet to make any major
breakthroughs internationally and have in fact suffered some reverses. In 2010, one
recently-recruited comrade left the IBT to become an anarchist in the aftermath of the
explosive protests against the G-20 in Toronto. More significantly, we failed to win over
members of the Coletivo Lenin (CL) in Rio de Janeiro, some of whom eventually aligned
themselves with Sam T., a talented but troubled former IBT member who departed in
September 2008 after deciding he was no longer prepared to carry out the directives of the
organization. Our failure to win the Brazilian comrades came as the disappointing
culmination of several years of effort and represented the loss of what had appeared to be
a promising opportunity to undertake work in an extremely important part of the world.

Despite our small forces, IBT comrades play a modest but real role in “far
left” politics in those areas where we are active. We intervene in major political
mobilizations and meetings, organize educational classes, hold public forums and, when
possible, participate in united-front actions with other groups. We also regularly attend
major international leftist events, including the annual Liebknecht/Luxemburg
commemoration in Berlin, the Left Forum in New York, the Fête de Lutte
Ouvrière near Paris and the SWP’s “Marxism” in London.

Our single most important activity is the regular (if infrequent) publication of
propaganda in English, German and French. Given our limited resources, we often have to
choose to address some issues at the expense of others. In doing so we attempt to take up
the most important questions and those most likely to push forward the process of
revolutionary regroupment:

“As the political level of our competitors has declined, we cannot
assume that the majority of the younger comrades who join OROs care, or even know, about
some of the defining moments of the 20th century, or are aware of some of the basic
elements of Marxism. However, it would be wrong to conclude from this that our task has
shifted toward becoming the ‘educator of the masses’ or that it requires a
programmatic adulteration of Trotskyism. What sets us apart is our program, and
the program of revolutionary socialism must be presented in clear and accessible terms in
order to attract the best elements. The weapon of polemical critique remains our most
powerful one.”

There are, of course, trade-offs: our limited ability to comment in a timely manner on
important issues of the day can make it impossible to intersect some potentially serious
people. In an attempt to broaden our audience, the conference document noted that
“it will be useful for us to produce more introductory socialist materials for the
raw elements (both organized and unorganized) we encounter on demonstrations and at
political meetings.” But we remain committed to placing a priority on addressing
vital issues confronting the international workers’ movement. The history of the
Trotskyist movement has repeatedly confirmed the importance of quality over
quantity—doing fewer things better—as the only way to forge effective
revolutionary cadre. Trotsky outlined this policy for the International Left Opposition in
July 1931:

“Our strength at the given stage lies in a correct appre-ciation, in a
Marxian conception, in a correct revolutionary prognosis. These qualities we must present
first of all to the proletarian vanguard. We act in the first place as
propagandists. We are too weak to attempt to give answers to all questions, to
intervene in all the specific conflicts, to formulate everywhere and in all places the
slogans and the replies of the Left Opposition. The chase after such universality, with
our weakness and the inexperience of many comrades, will often lead to too-hasty
conclusions, to imprudent slogans, to wrong solutions. By false steps in
particulars we will be the ones to compromise ourselves by preventing the workers
from appreciating the fundamental qualities of the Left Opposition. I do not want
in any way to say by this that we must stand aside from the real struggle of the working
class. Nothing of the sort. The advanced workers can test the revolutionary advantages of
the Left Opposition only by living experiences, but one must learn to select the most
vital, the most burning, and the most principled questions and on these questions engage
in combat without dispersing oneself in trifles and details. It is in this, it appears to
me, that the fundamental role of the Left Opposition now lies.”—“Some Ideas on the Period and the Tasks of the Left
Opposition”

Many of the leading comrades of our tendency are members of the “class of
’68”—and they are getting on in years. Their contributions remain
critical, but at the past two conferences we have deliberately sought to increase the
weight of younger comrades in our leadership collective. These comrades have taken on
important responsibilities and have generally performed them well. Today, they carry out
much of the work of the tendency.

Building a Marxist organization can be a very slow process during periods of retreat
and/or relative class quiescence. Today, with the prospect of accelerating class struggle,
we stand poised to enter a different period, one characterized by higher stakes and
greater risks. The cadres of the IBT face the future confident that the programmatic
acquisitions of the past that we have fought hard to maintain and defend through the lean
years will soon find a vastly larger audience, and that with the influx of fresh forces we
will have opportunities to play a much more significant role in the class struggle. Our
Tasks and Perspectives document concluded:

“We find ourselves at a conjuncture where capitalism stands discredited
in the eyes of millions of people around the world. The working class is looking for a way
out of their misery, but their traditional leaders do not lift a finger to change the
situation and in fact work to reinforce the power of the bourgeoisie. There is a crisis of
proletarian leadership that can be solved only on the basis of the historic program of
Trotskyism—represented after the destruction of the Fourth International by the
RT/SL and its political continuation, the IBT. Our tasks include seizing every opportunity
that comes our way to win new adherents to the program of Bolshevik-Leninism. Our
perspective is to survive and grow by expanding what we are programmatically, not by
changing it.”